WTF, Google

So starting some time last year, Google made "minor updates to your Google sign-in experience" that broke Lastpass and pissed off a heap of users for no good reason. Fair enough; we've all had plenty of time to learn to expect this kind of pants-on-head idiocy from our 1e100 overlords.

I wasn't affected at the time, because I'd seen the writing on the wall a couple of years ago and jumped ship to Fastmail. But the school's email service has just been cut over to a Google Apps For Education instance managed upstream from us (nobody at the school gets an admin login) and now I need to deal with their stupid fucking signon system multiple times per day.
So I added Auto-Type:{username}{enter}{delay 2000}{password}{enter} to the KeePass entry for my school GAFE account, and tested it, and it works. It's stupid and slow, but it works - unless I'd previously been lazy and let that particular browser remember my Google credentials. Then it doesn't work, because the browser pre-fills the password box and KeePass types shit into it and it all gets wocked up, but meh. It's Google. It's supposed to be annoying.

Tried my GAFE account from home for the first time tonight. WTF? At home, I'm still seeing the same old Google login page, the one with both username and password boxes that used to Just Work with KeePass and Lastpass and Everyotherpass because you can tab from one to the other. Ooookay... but now I can't use that page any more, because my KeePass is set up for the other one. Checked browser version: newer than what I'm running at school. Cleared cache: same behavior. Cleared cookies: same behavior.

Long story short: turns out that if the string Iceweasel/ appears anywhere in your UA, Google serves up the old-style login page. I'm tipping there's a Debian user somewhere inside Google who also thinks the two-page login thing is completely fucking stupid.

I've just been fooling about with Chromium on Linux. Looks like Iceweasel/ will turn the single page version on, but not if AppleWebKit/ is also present. Now trying OPR/ to see if that's the one string to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

Edit: Yes. OPR/ beats AppleWebKit/.

Next challenge: find a UA string where appending OPR/ does not get you the single-page, two-input Google login.

I sign into my Google account on a regular basis. Sometimes I get the two-page sign-on, other times it's one-page sign-on. Plus I also have 2-factor auth enabled. It doesn't really bother me too much either way.

I don't have to script anything at all. I just put my credentials in (typically I let it generate a password for me), and it guesses which field wants which value by the naming in the HTML. When it's wrong, it still knows which credentials go with this site, so i can ask it to copy my password to the clipboard and paste it in the right field, but it's rarely wrong.

Huh. Seems they changed things a bit.
Oh shaft orifice, they have infiniscroll too? Except, there's no newlivator, so how am I supposed to know how far along I am (other than hovering over the pretty non-discoverable icon on the LEFT of all the posts, reading the current post hovering over the "Jump to end" icon and reading the in-page tooltip (or hovering over the current post number, even more discoverable!)).

Also, circle avatars.
Also, posts require expanding by default apparently (how uncivilized!).
Also, clicking the "Go to the end" doesn't just jump to the end, no, it loads up every post made from the current view all the way down. At least "Go to the top" works as expected.

I don't have to script anything at all. I just put my credentials in (typically I let it generate a password for me), and it guesses which field wants which value by the naming in the HTML. When it's wrong, it still knows which credentials go with this site, so i can ask it to copy my password to the clipboard and paste it in the right field, but it's rarely wrong.

With KeePass, my usual workflow for logging onto a site goes

Bring the KeePass window to the front, and double-click the URL entry for the site I want.

Once that URL has opened in the browser, click whatever I have to in order to expose a Username box (most sites have a login page with its own URL and can skip this step); click or double-click in the Username box if necessary to prepare it for text entry.

Alt-Tab to get the KeePass window to the front again, then Ctrl-V. This makes KeePass minimize itself, then type the previously selected site's auto-type sequence into what is now the front window; by default, this is {username}{tab}{password}{enter}.

If things go wrong I can copy/paste or drag/drop username and password from KeePass to the browser, but this is almost never required.

Navigate to the site I want to log into. LastPass has a system where you can search for a site and open it from there, but I don't use it much.

In the Username box, there's a little LastPass logo. I click that to bring up a list of credentials that match this site.

I click the credentials I want, and it fills in the boxes it can find on the page.

If the logo doesn't show up or is hard to click, there's one in the extensions bar that does the same thing. From either, I cal also click a little wrench, which gives me options like "Copy username", "Copy password", or "Edit"

Clicked the logo, picked some credentials, it filled my email address.
clicked next and got:

Apparently that fancy animation means the password box was on the DOM when I filled it, so it got populated despite not being visible. That was a nice surprise, I expected to have to click again. If that hadn't worked, I could have clicked the icon again, clicked fill, and it'd dump just the password in the box.

Alt-Tab to get the KeePass window to the front again, then Ctrl-V. This makes KeePass minimize itself, then type the previously selected site's auto-type sequence into what is now the front window; by default, this is {username}{tab}{password}{enter}.

Just one less thing to go wrong for no real benefit. I use a lot of different browsers, most of which don't have all the sites I want bookmarked, so I'm effectively using KeePass as my bookmarks manager as well as my password safe.

That means navigating to any given site's login page already involves a trip to KeePass and has the side-effect of pre-selecting that site within KeePass, meaning that there is no work for the global hotkey's title-scrape and search to do; and if I never invoke it, it can never get that search wrong.

Once I'm at the login page, Alt-Tab Ctrl-V works reliably on any combination of KeePass/KeePassX, OS and browser and is not significantly slower than a global hotkey.

In effect, my steps 1 and 2 above are just the way I perform your "navigate to site's login page" step, and Alt-Tab Ctrl-V amounts to "press hotkey".